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Topic: (sp) The Garden of Death (Read 2644 times)

I think I may know what's happening. The island you're using, the afghan everon island, didn't come with an anim folder did it?

You know when you exit the editor or a mission that has taken place on one of the stock islands you have a repeating cutscene on the main menu? Well, those cutscenes are what are known as 'anims'.

If an island does not come with one of these repeating cutscene scripts, all you get when you leave that island is what you left with when you left the island, if that makes sense.

If you finished the outro of your mission with a blackout, and if afghan everon did not have an 'anim' script, then you will get a black screen after. Basically, your outro is ending, but all you see is the main menu screen shrouded in darkness.

Thats my theory.

Try using the same outro script on one of the stock islands.

Hope this helpsGruntage

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Some of the most memorable missions made involve the player doing very little...

"But one thing I can tell you from not just OFP but life in general: criticism is directly proportional to quality. The more criticism a mission receives, the better the outcome" - macguba

Just one thing I will mention though seeing as how we're approaching the review state, you should separate your addons and make sure they all have readme files. When the mission is reviewed the addons are listed separately and are supposed to have working links.

Will edit this post with feedback

EDIT: Ok, let's begin...

Overview

Looks ok, does its job well. The edges of the picture look a little jagged and I couldn't tell if there was a border or not. If not, I suggest you add one (it would fix the jagged edges issue).

Intro

Some nice effects to begin with, I would still consider looking into using custom text. The 'Iran 20XX' can be quite difficult to read as the sun is right behind it.

Noticed a couple of spelling/grammar errors:

Nato = NATOwith intent = with the intent

The new scenes are fine, overkill is avoided. The framerates dropped a few times, especially over the battle scenes. As it stands at the moment, the intro is quite good; setting up the scene well and preparing the player for what awaits him.

Briefing

Good to see a bigger range of weaponry. The text could be broken up a bit in both the plan and notes section, and I would lose the semi-colon at the start of the notes page. Also good to see a larger team, though after my last few plays I can't imagine my team lasting very long

Mission

As soon as the mission started my framerates took a hit, but after a minute it sorted itself out. I did laugh out loud at the size of the backpack on my character. I'm no expert but I think this is a little unrealistic considering he's supposed to be going on a covert demolition mission; you could see that backpack for miles.

Anyway, onto the mission itself. Within minutes my prediction turned out to be true; I lost all my team

I'll try again tomorrow with a new strategy but from the looks of it, the challenge has increased substantially since I last played it.

Will add more feedback on the mission part tomorrow when I get chance.

RegardsGruntage

« Last Edit: 08 Aug 2012, 22:29:04 by Gruntage »

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Some of the most memorable missions made involve the player doing very little...

"But one thing I can tell you from not just OFP but life in general: criticism is directly proportional to quality. The more criticism a mission receives, the better the outcome" - macguba

But btw those massive backpacks are burgens! The sas deploy on missions with them all the time Where else are you gonna store explosives and javelin missles http://dpm-alliance.net/22sas/a/fotky/44-Srbsko/03.JPGYeah they are a little big and in real life combat a solider would drop his burgen and pick it up after the contact ended but I wanted these guys looking like they where going on a long range demo mission behind enemy lines and would need tons of gear and supplies to stay alive.Also gave them a lil ghost recon look with the snazzy (but totally useless ingame) eye targeter thingy .

Ill get to work on the things you pointed out changing the font sounds hard lol and getting links for the all the addons kinda defeats the point in me making it easy to download and play straight away.If I could find a permanant dl location for the folder and jam all the readmes in with it along with a list of the addons, would that be acceptable?

Changing the font is a fairly difficult task but there should be a few tutorials on the subject lying around the editors' depot.

As for the addons, what you suggest sounds fine to me, as long as there are readme files for each addon. Normally the addons are listed separately and thus, must be downloaded separately, but looking at the shear number of addons in your mission this way of doing things would as you say make downloading the mission a real pain. I would probably get a second opinion on this as I'm not 100% sure myself.

Once you've fixed/added the stuff I mentioned and I've looked the mission over a few times, we can get this one reviewed

Well done on all your work so far

EDIT: Ok, I went back to play the mission again, with different tactics, So here is my review...

The difficulty has certainly increased from previous versions, and it was good to assess the enemy strength and plan my attack carefully. During the first objective I couldn't find any bugs at all; the objective ticked off as it should. Getting back to base was quite simple. I shot down 1 MI24 with an AA launcher I found, but the other two hinds proved to be quite annoying as I didn't have any proper means to shoot them down.

The defence of the base needs a lot of work doing to it. I must have defended that base for over an hour but the objective did not tick off. This is probably because of the 'last-man' bug (where there's only one enemy alive and he's preventing the mission from ending). You could solve this by having a trigger that ends the mission if the number of attacking forces drops below a certain amount.

The tanks were also very annoying as my javelins were overshooting repeatedly. I had almost got killed by an artillery blast and I was forced to crawl around the base, as the field hospital had been destroyed. Equipping the player with some means of healing himself would be a good idea here (my med had been killed early in the mission).

In terms of atmosphere and replayability this mission is great. If you want 45 mins of watching explosions and sniping enemies from hills then this is definately the mission for you. Eliminate the annoying bug at the end and we'll have ourselves a good mission ready for review.

Outro

The outro was...interesting. Interesting in a good way. Let's just say I was laughing my head off at the end . The dialogue was excellent, and the special effects were good. A nice conclusion to the mission, making the time spent worth it. Good job here.

Overall

Kinda touched on the overall aspect of the mission earlier, but I'll mention it again here. Good mission overall. Just fix that little problem at the end and we'll have a bug free mission (at least from what I can tell).

Even though once you remove that bug your mission will be review-worthy, you may want to polish the mission a little more; add custom text and all the decorative features I mentioned. Anything you want to do to improve the score (except perhaps a complete rebuild ).

« Last Edit: 09 Aug 2012, 21:53:34 by Gruntage »

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Some of the most memorable missions made involve the player doing very little...

"But one thing I can tell you from not just OFP but life in general: criticism is directly proportional to quality. The more criticism a mission receives, the better the outcome" - macguba

The addons are required to be listed with working links for the mission to be reviewed. The purpose of this is so that folks who already have the addon, don't have to download again, especially if their connection speed is slow. It's also been a requirement since the depot opened. Nothing stops you from uploading a mod pack to offer as convenience to those who don't mind the download though.

On the link to the download, it gets confusing sifting through what is what. You have several posts there with links. One has The Garden of Death and another has the Garden of Death version 2. Does that mean updated or the same mission designed with different addons or what? It would help us simple minded peasants if you could clarify things and just modify one post with links to each separate project, deleting outdated versions to prevent testers from providing feedback for the incorrect version.

Had a few playthroughs, and it's pretty good. Not sure if you want to make improvements, but:

-The M2s are insanely accurate. I found it very difficult to even get close to the depot without getting my team wiped out by machinegun fire from 600m away. I couldn't really snipe whilst being prone because my weapon would fire into the ground, and after moving forward to a point where I could shoot I was immediately disintegrated by machine gun fire. My recommendations would be to reduce the skill of the machineguns or replace them. Presently, they're too smart..especially as I'm using a silenced rifle.-I would definitely allow the user some limited saves. I don't think 1 is enough and it's frustrating to get so far and then be sprayed with a machinegun and have to negotiate my way back.-I think a GPS would be useful as well..would be realistic as I think SAS troops would certainly have one of these.

But, atmosphere and cinematic-wise, it's very good.

Logged

Some of the most memorable missions made involve the player doing very little...

"But one thing I can tell you from not just OFP but life in general: criticism is directly proportional to quality. The more criticism a mission receives, the better the outcome" - macguba